Simultaneous in-process control of weld pool geometry and heat affected zone based on thermal- optic imaging for welding of steel materials by concentrated energy fluxes

Abstract Robot welding using high power energy flow processes is widely used in the fabrication industry for increasing productivity and enhancing product quality. The application of infrared thermography to the adaptive control of different welding processes is discussed in this paper. Because these processes are difficult to control and automate, the quality of the product can vary over a large range. Therefore temperature gradients need to be controlled directly on-line with a high accuracy. This requires twodimensional temperature monitoring. A thermo-optic camera system can be used in order to investigate the cooling process in the weld seam area as well as in the heat affected zone. It was found that reasonable correlations exist between thermo-optical machine vision and weld seam quality, as far as weld pool geometry and thermal cycle interrogation is concerned

The SOX experiment in the neutrino physics

SOX (Short distance neutrino Oscillations with BoreXino) is a new experiment that takes place at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) and it exploits the Borexino detector to study the neutrino oscillations at short distance. In different phases, by using two artificial sources Cr-51 and Ce-144-Pr-144, neutrino and antineutrino fluxes of measured intensity will be detected by Borexino in order to observe possible neutrino oscillations in the sterile state. In this paper an overview of the experiment is given and one of the two calorimeters that will be used to measure the source activity is described. At the end the expected sensitivity to determine the neutrino sterile mass is shown

Development of dynamic models for neutron transport calculations

A quasi-static approach within the framework of neutron transport theory is used to develop a computational tool for the time-dependent analysis of nuclear systems. The determination of the shape function needed for the quasistatic scheme is obtained by the steady-state transport code DRAGON. The kinetic model solves the system of ordinary differential equations for the amplitude function on a fast scale. The kinetic parameters are calculated by a coupling module that retrieves the shape from the output of the transport code and performs the required adjoint-weighted quadratures. When the update of the shape has to be carried out, the coupling module generates an appropriate input file for the transport code. Both the standard Improved Quasi-Static scheme and an innovative Predictor-Corrector algorithm are implemented. The results show the feasibility of both procedures and their effectiveness in terms of computational times and accuracy

Five insights from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2019 provides a rules-based synthesis of the available evidence on levels and trends in health outcomes, a diverse set of risk factors, and health system responses. GBD 2019 covered 204 countries and territories, as well as first administrative level disaggregations for 22 countries, from 1990 to 2019. Because GBD is highly standardised and comprehensive, spanning both fatal and non-fatal outcomes, and uses a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive list of hierarchical disease and injury causes, the study provides a powerful basis for detailed and broad insights on global health trends and emerging challenges. GBD 2019 incorporates data from 281 586 sources and provides more than 3.5 billion estimates of health outcome and health system measures of interest for global, national, and subnational policy dialogue. All GBD estimates are publicly available and adhere to the Guidelines on Accurate and Transparent Health Estimate Reporting. From this vast amount of information, five key insights that are important for health, social, and economic development strategies have been distilled. These insights are subject to the many limitations outlined in each of the component GBD capstone papers.Peer reviewe

The SOX experiment: understanding the detector behavior using calibration sources

The SOX experiment investigates the existence of light sterile neutrinos. A solid signal would mean the discovery of the first particles beyond the Standard Electroweak Model and would have profound implications in our understanding of the Universe and of fundamental particle physics. In case of a negative result, it is able to close a long standing debate about the reality of the neutrino anomalies. The SOX experiment will use a $^{144}Ce-^{144}Pr$ antineutrino generator placed 8.5~m below the Borexino liquid scintillator detector. In view of the SOX experiment, a precise knowledge of the energy response and the spatial reconstruction of the antineutrino events is very important. Consequently, a calibration campaign of the Borexino detector is foreseen before the beginning of the SOX data taking. This paper briefly reviews the techniques used for calibrate the Borexino detector

Global, regional, and national burden of calcific aortic valve and degenerative mitral valve diseases, 1990-2017

Background: Non-rheumatic valvular heart diseases (NRVDs) are common; however, no studies have estimated their global or national burden. As part of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2017 study, mortality, prevalence, and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for calcific aortic valve disease (CAVD), degenerative mitral valve disease (DMVD), and other NRVD were estimated for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2017. Methods: Vital registration data, epidemiological survey data, and administrative hospital data were used to estimate disease burden using the GBD modeling framework, which ensures comparability across locations. Geospatial statistical methods were used to estimates disease for all countries, as data on NRVD are extremely limited for some regions of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Results accounted for estimated level of disease severity as well as the estimated availability of valve repair or replacement procedures. DALYs and other measures of health-related burden were generated for each sex, five-year age group, location, and year from 1990 to 2017. Results: Globally, CAVD and DMVD caused 102,700 (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 82,700 to 107,900) and 35,700 (95% UI 30,500 to 42,500) deaths, and had 12.6 million (95% UI 11.4 million to 13.8 million) and 18.1 million (95% UI 17.6 million to 18.6 million) prevalent cases in 2017, respectively. 1.5 million (95% UI 1.4 million to 1.6 million) DALYs were estimated as due to NRVD, globally, representing 0.26% (95% UI 0.22% to 0.27%) of total lost health from all diseases in 2017. The number of DALYs increased for CAVD and DMVD between 1990 and 2017, by 123% (95% UI 101% to 137%) and 64% (95% UI 50% to 75%), respectively. There is significant geographic variation in the prevalence, mortality rate, and overall burden of these diseases, with highest age-standardized DALY rates of CAVD estimated for high-income countries. Conclusion: These global and national estimates demonstrate that CAVD and DMVD are important causes of disease burden among older adults. Efforts to better understand modifiable risk factors and improve access to valve interventions are necessary if progress is to be made toward reducing, and eventually eliminating, the burden of these highly treatable diseases

Radioactive source experiments in Borexino

Most of the neutrino oscillation results can be explained by the three-neutrino paradigm. However several anomalies in short baseline oscillation data (L/E of about 1 m/MeV) could be interpreted by invoking a light sterile neutrino. This new state would be separated from the standard neutrinos by a squared mass difference \u394m2new 3c 0.1-1 eV2 and would have mixing angles of sin2 2\u3b8ee 73 0.01 in the electron disappearance channel. This new neutrino, often called sterile, would not feel standard model interactions but mix with the others. We present the CeSOX and CrSOX projects to constrain the existence of eV-scale sterile neutrinos by deploying an intense radioactive \u3b2-source next to the Borexino detector

Short distance neutrino oscillations with Borexino

The Borexino detector has convincingly shown its outstanding performances in the low energy, sub-MeV regime through its unprecedented accomplishments in the solar and geo-neutrinos detection. These performances make it the ideal tool to accomplish a state-of-the-art experiment able to test unambiguously the long-standing issue of the existence of a sterile neutrino, as suggested by the several anomalous results accumulated over the past two decades, i.e. the outputs of the LSND and Miniboone experiments, the results of the source calibration of the two Gallium solar neutrino experiments, and the recently hinted reactor anomaly. The SOX project will exploit two sources, based on Chromium and Cerium, respectively, which deployed under the experiment, in a location foreseen on purpose at the time of the construction of the detector, will emit two intense beams of neutrinos (Cr) and anti-neutrinos (Ce). Interacting in the active volume of the liquid scintillator, each beam would create an unmistakable spatial wave pattern in case of oscillation of the νe (or ν̅e) into the sterile state: such a pattern would be the smoking gun proving the existence of the new sterile member of the neutrino family. Otherwise, its absence will allow setting a very stringent limit on its existence